The CMO (Chief Misinformation Officer) of the climate ignorati, Joe Nocera, has a new piece, “ A Real Carbon Solution .” The biggest of its many errors comes in this line: A reduction of carbon emissions from Chinese power plants would do far more to help reverse climate change than — dare I say it?

By Kiley Kroh After a year full of mishaps and failures in its quest to drill for oil off the coast of Alaska, Royal Dutch Shell announced today that it would not pursue exploratory drilling activity in the Arctic Ocean this year. The decision comes as the Obama administration nears the end of its high-level, 60-day review of Shell’s troubled Arctic drilling program, which was announced on January 8. Last year was fraught with problems for Shell as the company attempted the first Arctic offshore exploratory drilling activity in decades. Technical failures, permit violations, struggles with the harsh and unpredictable Arctic conditions, and warnings from a wide range of voices all combined to discredit the company’s claims that such operations could be carried out safely and responsibly

By Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky via Shaping Tomorrow’s World There is growing evidence that conspiratorial thinking, also known as conspiracist ideation, is often involved in the rejection of scientific propositions.

Climate Scientists Erring on the Side of Least Drama by Dana Nuccitelli, via Skeptical Science A paper recently published in Global Environmental Change by Brysse et al. (2012) examined a number of past predictions made by climate scientists, and found that that they have tended to be too conservative in their projections of the impacts of climate change. The authors thus suggest that climate scientists are biased toward overly cautious estimates, erring on the side of less rather than more alarming predictions, which they call “erring on the side of least drama” (ESLD). In this paper, Brysse et al.

“Stern now believes he should have been more ‘blunt’ about threat to economies from temperature rises” — UK Guardian Another day, another climate expert explains the deadly combination of inaction and faster-than-expected impacts.

Thawing permafrost will release carbon to the atmosphere that will have an appreciable additional effect on climate change, adding at least one quarter of a degree Celsius by the end of the century and perhaps nearly as much as one degree (about 1.5°F). The permafrost feedback response to our historic emissions, even in the absence of future human emissions, is likely to be self-sustaining and will cancel out future natural carbon sinks in the oceans and biosphere over the next two centuries. Unfortunately, there are several good reasons to consider the outlook in this study as rosy — as the authors themselves make clear.

I previously dubbed the manufactured political outrage about the Department of Energy’s clean energy loan guarantee program the “Solyndra Standard.” While legislators and candidates hammer away at supposed “taxpayer giveaways,” they completely ignore the billions of dollars in defense boondoggles, fossil fuel subsidies, and agricultural subsidies — all of which dwarf investments like those to Solyndra. The graphic below illustrates this double standard quite well

An eagle-eyed reader directs us to this new ‘Forever’ stamp from the U.S. Postal Service. On Sunday, National Parks Traveler online explained : Come Monday, you can send Kenai Fjords National Park around the country

by Jennifer Morgan, via WRI Insights Australia, one of world’s most carbon-intensive countries, recently began implementing a comprehensive national policy to address climate change and transition to a clean-energy economy. Yesterday, WRI had the pleasure of hosting Mark Dreyfus , Australian Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, who outlined his country’s plans to a group of business, congressional, and NGO representatives. One point that came through at the event is that Australia’s recent energy and climate choices can be very instructive to the United States

A “seminal” 2009 study in Science of Arctic temperatures found that human-caused warming had overtaken 2,000 years of natural cooling (see Figure). A new study of the high Arctic provides further evidence for that conclusion

The future of wind tax credits is still tied up in Congress as the clock runs down to extend the production tax credit for wind (PTC) expiring at the end of the year. This week, 47 House Republicans urged House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to let them expire

Click on the image below to begin an interactive quiz created by Franke James , an artist who blends visual storytelling and science to inspire people to take action . (Click “Start Quiz” at the bottom of the post upon continuation)

by Katie Valentine Reducing our carbon output isn’t just good for the climate, it’s good for local health. When we price carbon, we potentially reduce other co-pollutants at power plants, oil refineries and industrial facilities — particularly in minority communities located disproportionately located near these pollution sources.

It looks like Romney’s mockery of Obama’s 2008 pledge of climate action had one positive impact. At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, President Obama said tonight to a large national TV audience: And yes, my plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet – because climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They’re a threat to our children’s future. And in this election, you can do something about it. Worth filling up a couple of shot glasses, I’d say — though repeating the denier “hoax” frame is not the way to debunk it

Who ever would’ve guessed that there would be a Labor Day card for global warming? But that is what SomeEcards are for: But “The Onion” of e-card companies makes a serious point: In the not-too-distant future, people are going to be amazed that anybody ever thought Labor Day signified the unofficial end of summer. As Climate Progress discussed in “ Mother Nature is Just Getting Warmed Up ” last year: Stanford climate scientists forecast permanently hotter summers The tropics and much of the Northern Hemisphere are likely to experience an irreversible rise in summer temperatures within the next 20 to 60 years if atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase, according to a new climate study by Stanford University scientists….

Warming-driven peatland fires are an amplifying climate feedback. Credit: NASA News story via NASA Forests and bog land in far eastern Russia have been burning since the beginning of June 2012. Contributing to the record fires have been the record temperatures of this past summer.

by Verity Payne, via the Carbon Brief Two new research papers published today improve our understanding of the planet’s methane emissions, and might raise worries about the role of the gas in warming the planet. The first suggests that there may be extensive methane deposits under the Antarctic ice sheets. Meanwhile, the second concludes that emissions of the gas from Arctic permafrost have been underestimated

Recently, climate change has been the Voldemort of the Obama Administration: ”The Threat-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.” In January, the President omitted any discussion of climate change from his State of the Union address , since, what really does the gravest threat to Americans and indeed all homo “sapiens” have to do with the state of the union? Then the White House edited climate change from Obama’s Earth Day 2012 proclamation

by KC Golden, via GRIP In a memorable TV ad saluting the hard work of Olympic athletes, swimmer Ryan Lochte reveals how he made it to the Games in London: “I swam here.” That would be one way to avoid the modest cost of carbon pollution permits required for aviation under the EU’s Emission Trading System. Senator John Thune has a less strenuous approach: Ban U.S.

by Peter Lehner, via NRDC’s Switchboard Waste is just that – a waste. A waste of time, money, and valuable resources, like food, clean water, fertile soil, or energy. As pointless as waste is, and as much as we dislike it, it is all around us. We waste almost half the food we grow or raise

The Senate Finance Committee voted to renew a tax credit for wind power that is set to expire at the end of this year, with several Republicans joining Democrats to support extending the credit for one more year at a cost of $3.3 billion.

Now that Mitt Romney’s campaign has officially declared the candidate’s desire to kill tax credits for wind while maintaining tax credits for the mature oil and gas industries, Midwestern Republicans are not happy. Iowa Republican Representative Tom Latham said Romney’s decision “shows a lack of full understanding of how important the wind energy tax credit is for Iowa and our nation.” And Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, the man working behind the scenes to get an extension of the tax credit for wind, said he thinks “people that didn’t know what they were doing said it.” In an interview with Radio Iowa today , Republican Governor Terry Branstad also had strong words for Romney’s campaign, saying they “need to get out here in the real world and find out what’s really going on” before abandoning support for the industry. The wind industry supports 7,000 jobs in Iowa and makes up 20 percent of the state’s electricity

Oklahoma continues to get scorched by extreme heat and drought. The entire state is now in extreme drought, and more than 70% of the state is in severe drought (or worse), up from 50% just a week ago. According to Gary McManus of the Oklahoma Climatological Survey, July was the 23rd month out of the last 28 to come in warmer than statewide averages. Bloomberg reports : More than 64 temperature records were broken in Oklahoma during a scorching July, and additional ones fell across the state Wednesday on the first day of August, according to the National Climatic Data Center

Data from Facebook, published on Wednesday, shows that despite the social networking’s rising star, its carbon emissions are still a fraction of internet rival Google. Facebook’s annual emissions were 285,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent in 2011, compared with Google’s 1.5m tons in 2010.

The Senate hearing on climate science this Wednesday, unsurprisingly enough, appears to have changed little with respect to the politics of climate change on Capitol Hill. Indeed, a significant portion of the discussion was dominated by debate over Dr. John Christy’s particular brand of denialism, a well-trod debate .

In the 2012 election cycle, President Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney have been keeping one specific demographic in mind – Latinos. Many analysts think Hispanic voters are the key to the outcome of the 2012 presidential election, specifically in swing states such as Nevada and Florida

Last week, the NY Times online asked me to contribute to their “ Room for Debate .” The questions were “Is the current drought raising the possibility of another Dust Bowl? If so, what can we do to prevent it?” My response is below, followed by a terrific new video by Peter Sinclair on “2012 Drought Update.” UPDATE: At the very end, I’m adding the news release for a new study that makes clear the West is facing, “ a new climatology that would make the 21st century climate like mega-droughts of the last millennium ,” as the lead scientist put it

Mitt Romney has thus far refused to heed the call from a growing number of people within the Republican party to release more tax returns. And during an interview with ABC’s David Muir from Israel, the former Massachusetts governor revealed that the documents may show that he paid very little in taxes: Romney tells @ DavidMuir he doesn’t know if there was a year when he paid a tax rate lower than 13.9%. Says he’ll have to go back and look

Another week, another idiotic headline in the New York Times : “ We’re All Climate-Change Idiots .” Who is to blame for the nation’s inaction on climate? Who is to blame for the fact that a climate bill that passed the House in 2009 — and that would have put us on a path to take stronger action than any other country in the world — didn’t become law? Could it be the anti-democratic, extra-constitutional, super-majority “requirement” that only bills that get 60 votes in the Senate can become law